A thing I see happening in good forums:

ifixcoinops@retro.social

🦝 Hey fellow doofer-enjoyers, I have a 2006-model purple doofer. I'm trying to get it to interface with the green 2009 doohickey but I'm not having any luck so far, has anybody else tried this?
Oh I think I remember was trying that a few years back, hey did you get anywhere with that
Kinda, here's the thread [link]
️ That really should've gone in the wiki
Yeah well I never got it all the way done though. 🦝, you wanna turn the green one at 90 degrees to the purple one and click your heels twice, that's as far as I got before I gave up on it
Oh this is like with the turquoise whadjamacallit, lemme find that thread...
[4 pages of discussion and testing and throwing out ideas and figuring things out later]
🦝 Okay I tried standing on my right foot and heck, it works! Thanks guys, that was really helpful!
️ Awesome, I put a very quick rough write-up and a link to this thread in the wiki, for future searchers. 🦝, if you could check out that page and make sure it's accurate, that'd be great
🦓 Great write-up ️, I linked to it from both the 2006-purple and the 2009-green pages. If anybody else wants to tidy up the formatting etc that'd be super useful

The forum is for figuring out, and the wiki is for showing what we've figured out.

And y'know, maybe 🦝 and ended up in the chat, while they were right in the flow of test-things-quick, and realtime chat is good for that, but it's bad at showing the results. The results just float off up the page with time, replaced by new chat about new stuff, even if the old stuff is still true and valid and useful. The longer the chat runs, the more time you have to spend scrolling up to find the thing. The same goes for the forums; it happens at a slower pace, but everything still floats off down the time stream, the best chunks of proven-truth floating just like the mistakes and wrong-turns that happened during the proving.

Worse, the most posted-in threads tend to be the figuring-out threads. Once you've figured it out, there's not as much need to post and bump the thread back up to the top, so the threads most likely to float off are the ones that have got a bit of figured-out-and-proven truth in them.

But in a good forum with a wiki attached, there are lots of ️ who fish little bits of figured-out from the figuring-out-stream and save them somewhere else, where they won't float off.

Without having some kind of wiki or static page or other sort of recency-independent repository of information, what folk end up doing is they generate ideas, they test, they make mistakes and correct them, they ask questions, they boil and condense and distill their thinking-out-loud streams-of-consciousness into a source of Actual Properly-Figured-Out Truth, and then set that perfect refined information on a little paper boat and wave to it as it floats off down the time stream, out of relevance, further from retrievability.

Forums and chat and social media are great for discussion and pure dogshit at storing information, and wikis and webpages are the opposite, but you've gotta use both. You have to use both. At some point your truths have to be written down somewhere that doesn't display most-recent-first. That's the only way to get off the treadmill of constantly figuring out the same things over and over and start living in a place where things are, and have been, Properly Figured Out.

I've been thinking about this today because I saw a person on Fedi who had, as a pinned post, an index of all the really good posts she'd made. Do I have one of those posts? Do I bollocks, what I have instead is a list of bookmarks to refer to when someone asks "Hey I was thinking about your bike thread the other day, do you remember the URL" and you know what I do? I look at the top of my bookmarks and it's not there, and I go through like forty open tabs until I find it, and I untick the bookmark and tick it again so that it's now most-recent, at the top of the bookmarks list. That's no fucking way to live. That's not a library, that's a cursed backpack that keeps getting heavier

ifixcoinops@retro.social

It reminds me of the first time I really noticed how bad search engines had gotten. It was 2021 and I was making a pub-style picnic table. You know the ones, two long benches with a long table in between and the whole thing is one piece with a pair of A-frames. I searched for some plans and cut lists, and every search engine wanted to show me How To Make A Pub Picnic Table In 2021, or 2021's Best Pub Picnic Tables or Hot New Picnic Table Plans For 2022.

Tables like this aren't new and there really isn't a new way of doing them, they're the same today as they were before I was born, they're absolutely a solved problem. The top result should've been the article with the best photos and the clearest, easiest-to-follow instructions, but a computer can't tell whether instructions are clear or pictures are properly illustrative, so they have to judge articles on shit that doesn't matter, like how often it says "pub picnic table" or when the article was last updated, and it's gotten to the point where a computer can write an article that a search engine will think is awesome but which is absolutely fucking useless for anyone trying to read it.

We desperately need more ️ in the world.